What Happens When a Patient, a Clinician and a Data Scientist Walk Into a Room

Every day patients are generating data but no one knows what to do with it to improve health.  Patients are faced with choices but often use the internet to find the best answer. Clinicians are facing decisional dilemmas without a radar on what could happen or a dashboard on what happened. Health systems are faced with larger decisions and the incentives may not always be fully aligned to improve health. What if we had a different world? What if we had a world in which data generated every day was collected, curated and transformed to information that mattered? And what if we embedded research to discover what was needed today as well as what can happen tomorrow?  We are in a perfect storm which patients, clinicians and data scientists are working together to solve these problems. These advances are also being applied alike to systems biology and reengineering health care delivery. However, there are benefits and risks to getting the wrong answers without research, development and rigor.

Dr. Hernandez is a cardiologist with extensive experience in clinical research ranging from clinical trials to health services policy research. Since 2017, he has been the Vice Dean for Clinical Research at the Duke University School of Medicine.  Previously, he was a Faculty Associate Director of Duke Clinical Research and Director of Health Services and Outcomes Research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute.  He is the Coordinating Center Principal Investigator for multiple networks and clinical trials such as the NHLBI’s Heart Failure Research Network, PCORI’s National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) and NIH’s Health System Collaboratory. He has served as the Steering Committee Chair or Principal Investigator of multiple large studies in the field of cardiovascular medicine and diabetes. Dr. Hernandez has over 450 published articles in high-tier journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Lancet. He is an elected member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation and Association of American Physicians. He received his bachelor's degree from Rice University and his medical degree from the University of Texas-Southwestern School of Medicine. He completed an internship, residency in the Department of Medicine at University of California-San Francisco and cardiology fellowship at Duke University.

Dr Manvendra Singh
Assistant Professor
Cardiovascular & Metabolic Disorders Programme
Duke-NUS Medical School

Ms Kathleen Chan, Duke-NUS Research Affairs

kathleen.chan@duke-nus.edu.sg